The comedian thinks that PC culture, particularly on college campuses, has gone too far

Speaking
on ESPN Radio’s “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” on Thursday, Jerry
Seinfeld weighed in on the issue of political correctness as it pertains
to comedy. Asked by Cowherd if PC culture hurts comedy, Seinfeld
responded definitively: “Yes, it does.” He went on: “I don’t
play colleges but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near
colleges, they’re so pc.’ I’ll give you an example: My daughter’s 14. My
wife says to her, ‘Well, you know, in the next couple of years, I think
maybe you’re going to want to hang around the city more on the weekends
so you can see boys.’ You know, my daughter says, ‘That’s sexist.’ They
just want to use these words. ‘That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s
prejudice.’ They don’t even know what they’re talking about.”

This
isn’t the first time Seinfeld has expressed his frustration with
political correctness. Responding to criticisms about the lack of
diversity on his show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” last year,
Seinfeld said: “This really pisses me off. People think it’s the census
or something, it’s gotta represent the actual pie chart of America. Who
cares?… I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. To
me, it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC nonsense, than are you making
us laugh or not.”

Of course, Seinfeld isn’t alone. In recent
years, many comedians have spoken out about how increased audience
sensitivity — particularly on college campuses — is harmful to comedic
freedom.

Chris Rock, speaking to New York Magazine
last year, echoed similar sentiments saying that he has stopped playing
colleges because they are too conservative “in their social views and
their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of
‘We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody
to lose.’ Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say ‘the black
kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even
be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Friday, June 12, 2015

Thursday, June 11, 2015

From Vox:http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraidby Edward SchlosserJune 3, 2015I'm
a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college
classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied
pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student
evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am
conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a
healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things
have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish
there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare
me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a
person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher
dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously
consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the
ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any
affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is
limited at best.

What it was like before

In early 2009, I
was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community
college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a
flash animation describing how Wall Street's recklessness had destroyed
the economy.

The video stopped, and I asked whether the students thought it was effective. An older student raised his hand.

"What
about Fannie and Freddie?" he asked. "Government kept giving homes to
black people, to help out black people, white people didn't get
anything, and then they couldn't pay for them. What about that?"

I
gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that
assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty
dishonest, and isn't it good that someone made the video we just watched
to try to clear things up? And, hey, let's talk about whether that was
effective, okay? If you don't think it was, how could it have been?

The rest of the discussion went on as usual.

The
next week, I got called into my director's office. I was shown an
email, sender name redacted, alleging that I "possessed communistical
[sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story."
The story in question wasn't described, but I suspect it had do to with
whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.

My
director rolled her eyes. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I
wrote up a short description of the past week's class work, noting that
we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media
and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative
narratives along with the liberal ones.

Along with a carbon-copy
form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have
existed. Then ... nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it
beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I never
heard another word of it again.

That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me.

Progressives entangle themselves in "thickets of idiocy" trying not to judge Islam. Jon Stewart was no exception

Progressive
critics enamored of the semantically fraudulent junk label
“Islamophobe” are de facto aiding the assassins of free-thinkers,
abetting the oppressors of women, and shielding razor-happy butchers
slicing off the clitorises of little girls. And at no time do they
betray the ideals for which they supposedly stand more than when they
call ex-Muslims living in the West “Islamophobe.”

To
understand why, let’s examine the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. No one
exposes the faulty thinking, moral incoherence and double standards
pervading the Western liberal reaction to Islam better than this
Somali-born, self-professed “infidel” and “heretic.” Herself a survivor
of female genital mutilation, civil war and forced marriage, and, for
more than a decade now, the object of Islamist death threats, Hirsi Ali
deserves the respect of all who cherish free speech, equality between
the sexes, and the right to profess the religion (or no religion) of
one’s choosing.

Brought up a Muslim and once so devout
she joined the Muslim Brotherhood, Hirsi Ali deserves, to say the
least, a fair hearing when speaking of Islam. Yet in the
constitutionally secular United States, Hirsi Ali often finds her views
about her former faith treated with suspicion, even contempt. Her media
appearances and publications occasion slews of sanctimoniously ignorant
commentary from liberal “Islamophobia” scolds. The publicity tour she
has been making for her recent book “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a
Reformation Now” is no exception.

Before I proceed, a
statement of what should be obvious: Islam is not a race, but a
religion, one with universalist pretensions and followers of all skin
colors. Understanding this, one easily sees through the linguistic sham
that is the essence of “Islamophobia” and “Islamophobe,” terms that
inveigle well-meaning progressives to conflate skin color with religion
and impute racism to critics of a belief system. The terms are
inherently political, and serve one purpose: to squelch honest debate
about Islam. Islam, though, like all religions, is nothing but a
hallowed ideology falling within the purview of free speech. People
deserve respect, whatever their ideology. The ideologies themselves?
Not necessarily.

Back to Hirsi Ali and “Heretic.” Hirsi Ali summed up her book’s theses in an Op-Ed
for the Wall Street Journal. Radical Islam now motivates terrorism and
warfare across the globe, but “by far,” she writes, “the most numerous
victims of Muslim violence . . . are Muslims themselves.” She considers
it “foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the
violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from
the religion itself.” Her conclusion: “Islam is not a religion of peace.” (Italics hers.)

Hirsi
Ali does not, however, contend that most Muslims are violent. On the
contrary, peaceful followers of Islam “are the clear majority throughout
the Muslim world.” But the jihadi-minded account for, by her
conservative estimate, at least 3 percent of the religion’s 1.6 billion
votaries, or 48 million people. The problem, for her, lies in “the call
to violence and the justification for it . . . explicitly stated in the
sacred texts of Islam.” To counter this, she proposes an Islamic
reformation, one that would lead Muslims to reject their canon’s calls
for violence, as do, by and large, Jews and Christians today.

Saudi
Arabia has decided to uphold its decision to sentence Raif Badawi, a
31-year-old blogger who was imprisoned in 2012 after being charged for
insulting Islam through his website, to 10 years in prison and 1,000
lashes in public, Badawi's wife said Sunday.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson